There’s a guy that works with me, Ralph, who invited me along to Wondercon last weekend. What is Wondercon I hear you ask? It’s essentially a comic book convention, attended by 30,000 people over 3 days at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. What attracted me about it is not only is it a huge geek and nerd get-together (like those comic book conventions you always see on The Simpsons), but this was a paying gig - working for Ralph as he sold lots of merchandise. Now, I realise that my knowledge on comics is tenuous at best but I have worked in a shop for years and know all the lies to tell people to get them to buy stuff. “Is this first print?” they would say. “Of course it is” would be my sharp reply. “A real bargain”.

What is cool about the event is that there are loads of people come in costume. I met tons of storm troopers, Japanese anime characters, superheroes and other completely unique people, including one guy who appeared to encased himself in fiber optic cable lights. This guy obviously couldn’t decide between coming as a storm trooper, or Elvis so he settled on both:

There were a lot of cool stalls all around the place. Most of the stuff I had no idea about but at Ralph’s stall there were thousands of really old comics for a $1 each, so I bought a 1991 copy of the Turtles II movie comic, just for the namesake. We must of sold a few thousand comics over the 3 days we were there, loads of people took advantage of the ‘100 comics for $35′ offer. And nearly all of them looked exactly like comic book guy. It’s true that in the comic community there is definitely a strong majority of beards compared with clean shaven. And long hair seems to be fashionable here too, along with a rotund posture.

There were a few celebrities that showed up too for some promo work. On the first day, Brendan Fraser was there to promote Journey to the Centre of the Earth, a new 3d movie. I actually got 2 free tickets to see a preview of the movie later that night but ended up missing it by being late. On the second day there was Steve Carrell (40 year-old Virgin) and Anne Hathaway, promoting their new movie Get Smart, and finally David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson showcasing the new X-Files movie. Wish I had a picture of them, but alas not.

I missed out on the last day due to being back at work, but all in all was a good weekend. The largest of the comic conferences takes place in San Diego but it’s essentially the same as Wondercon in SF. I was interesting and more than a little nerdy, but fun all the same.

Also, I met Gumbi - highlight of my weekend!

I like challenging myself, and I like learning new things.

For example, yesterday I did the thing with my friends where you try to list as many US states as you can in 10 minutes. Overall, I won - I managed to get 47. Last time I did this was in school and I think I got maybe 30. So clearly I’m learning. For those interested, I forgot Indiana, Kentucky and Wisconsin.

So in the spirit of testing myself, I have went back to school as it were on Gerry, my trusty acoustic guitar which I brought with me from home. It’s almost full circle for Gerry - I brought him to San Francisco from Broughshane, and I bought it used in Londonderry, and the guy I bought it from got it in Canada, where Seagulls are made.

In the coming months I will be equipping myself with the simply outstanding Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier (really, the Triple is simply too rocktastically loud for the size of ‘arenas’ we play) and so this Holy Grail of amps deserves only the finest music to be played through it. Thus, I have embarked on a series of learning, teaching myself classic rock guitar solos.

I’ve set the bar quite high and have made a start on what is considered one of rock n roll’s greatest guitar solos of all time - Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. So far, I’ve managed to get the first few bars down, including that tricky little run just after the first note. It’s good practice for me because along the way I hope to improve my sloppy technique and tighten up my playing for when I get back to Ireland and begin playing with the band again.

Here’s a short list of what will be on my learning agenda for the next while:

• Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
• More than a Feeling - Boston
• Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne
• Sweet Child O Mine - Guns n’ Roses
• Eruption - Van Halen

Yes, I realise the last one is a tad ambitious, but really I only hope to be able to play the famous arpeggio section to Eruption. Thus far, I’ve got Hotel California more or less correct, which is one of my favourite solos.

Maybe I should teach guitar for extra cash. Hmm…

Click here to see all the photos

Reno is about 20 minutes north of North Lake Tahoe, just over the California border and in Nevada. It’s famous for many things - casino’s, Harrah’s, and of course, it’s where part of Sister Act was filmed. I spent my Friday and Saturday there last week.

Getting there

I went with Valerie, because we both agreed Valentine’s day is totally stupid and is a waste of money so we decided to go somewhere instead of forking out for a miserable dinner somewhere where they bleed your wallet dry. Reno seemed to be as appealing as anywhere, so we set about making the arrangements.

Last time I went to Lake Tahoe, the snow was so thick that my car was all over the road and how I got back in one piece is nothing short of a miracle. I was therefore in no rush to traverse the winding mountain roads of the Sierra’s, so we opted for the Greyhound bus. We got about $80 knocked off the price by the casino’s, which I’m still not sure how they make their money on that. As well as that, we got $13 each credit at the Sands casino in Reno free with our tickets.

The bus on the way up was a little cramped, but altogether quite relaxing. Unfortunately we had two nightmare passengers - one, a young woman who didn’t shut up the entire time talking to anybody that would listen to her totally crap stories, and crying down the phone to her mother. Luckily, she got off in Sacramento, only to be replaced by an equally annoying old woman who was amazed at almost every view from the bus, and felt it extremely important that she make loud exclamations to ensure every passenger was aware of her profound experiences. And her laugh was both irritating and needlessly loud, causing all the other passengers to cringe. We ran a little behind schedule but ended up at Circus Circus in Reno around 1.30pm on Friday.

Our Hotel

As we were staying only one night, the accommodation wasn’t very important and we just wanted somewhere cheap but nice. I don’t condone gambling, but if there’s one thing that’s good about casinos it’s that they have a ability to make everything else cheap. We spent $50 and got a huge room at Fitzgerald’s Irish casino plus a $5 money off coupon for their huge $9.95 buffet. The casino was actually quite charming, and the room was excellent.

First Day

We spent the first day just looking around the city - it’s pretty small so you don’t really even need a car. The weather was pretty good, it wasn’t very warm but it was sunny which made it feel warmer. We visited a lot of the big casinos like Circus Circus and Harrah’s, which are pretty impressive. Circus Circus is especially fun, they have a kids ‘casino’ which we spent most of our time in. Rather than play for money, it’s more like a fun fair and you play for tokens or terrible little stuffed elephants and the like.

It didn’t take long to discover that a lot of the kids in the place seemed to be unaware that they were winning tokens, or else they were just being careless. Either way, it worked out very well for Valerie and me - we nicked all the tokens that the kids left behind and ended up with a stash of over 200, which actually doesn’t buy you a lot in a casino. We traded them for two fluffy dice and a load of lollipops. Not bad considering it didn’t cost anything.

We spent most of our money on more fun things like the dance machine, Whack a Mole and this game where you have to burst a balloon by squirting water into a clown’s mouth. We lost every time. I also lost a dart throwing game. I suck at fairground games.

In the evening we went for dinner at a place called the Nugget, which is a casino famous for it’s Awful Awful burger - which is a half pound burger with half a pound of fries, for $5. It was actually pretty decent. There didn’t appear to be much happening in the city that night, so rather than go to a show that we probably would only half enjoy, we just headed back to the hotel and went to bed. I had intended to call the front desk and request a 5.30am wakeup call for our neighbours, just to be annoying, but alas, I forgot. Shame, could have been very funny.

Day Two: Grand Sierra

On the second day we weighed up our options and decided that we should go out to Grand Sierra. It’s a casino resort a few miles outside of town that supposedly had loads of things to do. We checked out, left our stuff at the bell desk and got breakfast at the casino’s buffet (remember the $5 off coupon? Yeah, we forgot to use it…d’oh!). The buffet was excellent, it had all you can eat everything, and after I walked outta the place with a bit of a John Wayne strut going on. Appetites satisfied, we took the bus out to the casino. It’s basically a huge hotel out on it’s own and my goodness it’s got everything! The activities outside weren’t as impressive as I’d hoped, but we did go go-karting twice - once on the road track (I won), and once on the drift track (again, I won). It was fun, you only get 5 minutes for $6 but it is fun. The drift track especially. I did a badass powerslide around a corner passing a really cocky guy in the process.

Straight after the karting, we played a round of mini-golf on a rather poor course. It’s really not American mini-golf unless it has a windmill in my opinion. Guess who won, as usual.

After an exhaustive day of winning everything, we headed back inside the casino to take a look about. This place was huge. Even it’s bathrooms were cool - they were pimped out in black marble and they didn’t have sinks - they had a marble bench angled downwards to drain the water. They had a Johnny Rockets restaurant where we got a great milkshake, and an entire shopping mall on the floor below, which included a whole arcade of kids games. It’s a similar idea with the tokens. Some kid hit the jackpot on Monopoly and won 500 tokens, but walked off with collecting them. Luckily, I was there to collect his winnings. It took close to 10 minutes for the machine to spit out all 500 tokens, which I took a video of. We spent the tokens on a horrible water-filled ball monstrosity, a jumping rubber frog, some popping candy and a bottle of bubbles. Well spent considering the quality of the prizes.

Thoroughly satisfied with our winnings, we called it quits and went back to Reno where we took some more photos and bought a few souvenirs. We had dinner at Fitzgerald’s again, this time at the restaurant and got a rather average grilled cheese sandwich. Two buffets in one day seemed a bit much.

Almost out of time, we went to the Sands casino to spend our $13 credit, only to get totally confused with how the system works and wasted all our credits. I won a $1.25 overall, which I was quite happy about. Better than Valerie, she won a quarter. Worst of all, she claimed her winnings with not a hint of embarrassment.

The bus got us back to San Francisco around 2am and was much more pleasant than the ride up. A great little weekend, and overall pretty cheap. Worth going to if you don’t have the time to go to Vegas. Check out the rest of the pics on my Flickr.

I’ve had a really crappy week at work, but luckily I’m spending my two days off in Reno, Nevada.
I’m taking the bus up as driving to Tahoe last time was one of the worst experiences of my life. Plus renting a car between two people is too expensive. Takes ages to get there on the bus (6.5 hours…) but at least I can relax.

Greyhound isn’t cheap either, for the two of us it was $160, but for some bizarre reason there’s a ‘casino’ discount on the bus so we got our tickets for $40 each. Not sure how that works.

Well, must go to bed. 5am start tomorrow, but I have the new episode of Lost to watch on the way there. Adios.

I snapped this today. It belongs to my new Korean roommate;

At least now we know what Mr. Wilson is doing in his retirement, friend.

Foo Fighters

I went with the girlfriend to see the Foo Fighters on Saturday night at the Oakland Arena, about 20 minutes outside San Francisco. We had to walk from the BART station to the Arena and it was absolutely pouring with rain. Over at the Coliseum there was a monster truck rally, and I was so thankful we weren’t going to it, standing outside in the cold and wet.

Prior to the gig, I had met Valerie at the Powell BART station in downtown SF. When I met her she was doing a ‘free stress test’. I knew what was going on immediately. Scientologists. They do these ‘free stress tests’ which seems quite convincing but basically they hook you up to an e-meter and try to convince you that dianetics is fact. They’re quite cunning people, these Scientologits - there’s no mention of Scientology at all, the only clue is the books they sell are all by, you guessed it, L. Ron Hubbard.

Valerie was quite entertained by the guy talking her through her stress test. I’ll admit, he was a very nice guy and was totally non-threatening and he didn’t even mention his cult religion but afterwards when I told Val who he was and what he was doing, she seemed fairly shocked.

Anyway, we took our seats at the Foo’s gig and unfortunately we had rather rubbish seats way at the top tier near the far end of the arena. We slipped past security and found better seats much closer to the stage on the bottom row and hoped that we didn’t get caught on, and luckily after a few [convincingly acted] misunderstandings with seating the gig began.

The opening act were Hello Stranger, who weren’t bad actually, but nothing special. Up afterwards was Against Me who are a little like a cross between disco and punk with Irish style punk vocals. Not bad, but their recorded stuff is a lot better than their live performance.

By the time the Foo’s came out the arena was really filling up and was absolutely heaving with people. I don’t think it was a total sell out, but there weren’t too many empty seats in the 20,000 seater arena. I took loads of photos but my lack of a decent camera (boo Connor) means that I only snapped on photo in focus the whole night, so enjoy:

They actually had two stages, the main stage and then another stage was lowered from the ceiling for a very unexpected acoustic set. You can see the acoustic stage off the to left on this photo.

I have to admit, the Foo Fighters are very impressive in concert. I hadn’t bought the new album, but luckily they didn’t play too many songs off it and there were old favourites in the set like Monkey Wrench and even Big Me. Dave Grohl is absolutely fantastic - his voice is brilliant live and how he screams every night of their tour without damaging his voice is rather amazing.

During the set they played a 15 minute version of Stacked Actors, complete with a guitar duel and Taylor Hawkins drum solo. The whole song was fantastic, and tight as a duck’s arse.

Probably the highlight of the evening was the last song they played during the acoustic set which inspired Dave to climb on top of the piano and rock out on his acoustic guitar, breaking a string.

Everlong was also awesome - started off on the acoustic stage, then all goes quiet and Dave rips a huge chord from his Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier that, I’m guessing, caused instant pregnancy in all women in the arena. He makes a run down to the main stage and the song plays out with full band and full on Mesa face-melting distortion.

Dave is quite the songwriter. You don’t don’t expect much performance or talent from drummers (come on, just look at Phil Collins…maybe Don Henley is an exception) but this guy is one of a dying breed of rock stars. He’s got the long hair back again too, which instantly makes him cool.

Predictably, they end thier show with Best of You which is nothing short of brilliant. Excellent night all round, I head home with a happy girlfriend in tow.

Moving

I got a rude awaking on Sunday morning basically telling me I had to get out of my room. I slept in a bit and forgot I had to check out of my accommodation. I was moving back to my wonderful place on O’Farrell St but had to get out of my other place first. I quickly packed up all my stuff (took about 30 minutes, I have a lot of stuff) and moved back to O’Farrell. Very happy now. I invited some people around for house warming, ordered pizza and settled down to watch the Superbowl.

Superbowl

I’m not much of a football fan, really I was only watching the Superbowl for the adverts and the Tom Petty halftime show but the football was actually quite good. It was one of the lowest scoring matches in a long time, and the New England Patriots were almost sure to win having a perfect season, but at the last few minutes New York Giants came in and stole it from them. Was quite miffed, would have liked to see New England win it. Lucky I’m not a gambler!

The half time show was nothing spectacular, don’t think much could top Prince last year. The adverts were funny, but no racy ones like the GoDaddy ad from last year either. Although the Coca Cola one with Stewie was funny, check it out on YouTube.

Not many plans for the rest of the week. Can’t wait for Lost to start again tomorrow. Ohhhh…..